A man on the platform back of the binder pitched the bundles to
the stacker who built them into conventional cone-shaped stacks,
where they remained until the last job was threshed. Then the
Humphrey crew drove from job to job with a team of the largest
I’ve ever seen and baled the long rye straw bundles into long
square bales. The horses operated a sweep winch which compressed
process today would seem unbearably slow. The baled straw was
shipped to harness factories where it was cut into 11 inch lengths
and used to stuff horse collars. I have seen this done and still
have two straw-stuffed horse collars.
Some jobs were threshed right from the shocks but others stacked
the grain bundles – then there was little danger of loss by
excessive rain. The engineer in the picture is my Uncle – Ernest
Williams.
The stacks of grain were built in groups of four and the machine
pulled in between, threshed, and moved to next group. Mr. Watson is
now 78 and going strong lives in Corunna, Ontario, Canada.
